Category

Environment

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this [20th] century he is beginning to realise that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It is often said that people in the bush have decided the last few elections. If so, they have installed a Liberal National Coalition which denies climate science. The irony is that it will be the people in the bush who will suffer most from climate change.

BlotReport

It might seem bonkers that some of the worst climate-change deniers seem committed to blaming "greenies" for the holocaust on the eastern seaboard. But it makes a sick kind of sense. Somebody has to take the blame and they’ll be damned, literally, if it has to be them. So in a twist, they blame those who have been trying to save us from hellfire.

John Birmingham

If Mr. Morrison’s government genuinely believed the science, it would immediately put a price on carbon, declare a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects and transfer the fossil fuel subsidies to the renewables industries. It would go to the next round of global climate talks in Glasgow in November allied with other nations on the front line of this crisis and argue for quicker and deeper cuts to carbon emissions around the world. Anything less is to collaborate in the destruction of a country.
But the government is intent on doing nothing.
And to the names of those historic betrayers of their people — Vidkun Quisling, Benedict Arnold, Mir Jafar — perhaps one day will be added that of Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia who, when faced with the historic tragedy of his country’s destruction, dissembled, enabled, subsidised and oversaw omnicide, until all was ash and even the future was no more.

Richard Flanagan